In voice processing systems, resources such as processor time and memory spaces are utilized to perform tasks on the accessed application. An exemplary voice processing system is described in commonly owned application Ser. No. 10/645,051 which is incorporated by reference. The system described in the commonly owned application includes a plurality of servers connected by a network, each server including engines for performing tasks including speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification, and the like. Appropriate telephone equipment is connected to voice processing systems in order to provide services over land-line, mobile, voice over IP, or similar telephone infrastructures.
A processing system so configured is capable of running applications such as voice-response product listings and directory assistance services. As disclosed in the commonly owned patent application, the processing system applications may be made modular and may be distributed over any number of servers, accommodating varying loads.
The data underlying the processing system's applications may be updated periodically. One example, in the case of a voice-response product listing, is when the set of available products is updated. Due to the nature of these data changes to the database, the application may need to update grammars and other application databases periodically. One current approach is to create a “snapshot” of the current database, develop a new set of grammars, and then load the snapshot. Unfortunately, loading the grammars and the databases corresponding to the updated application can take a significant amount of time and for many applications this interruption may not be acceptable.
Another approach found in the prior art is to operate two independent systems, complete with independent application servers, independent speech recognition servers, and independent databases. This solution has the disadvantage of requiring at least two servers of each kind, even in situations where one server would be sufficient to handle the total transaction volume.